Medford City Council Resident Services & Public Engagement Committee, 11/04/2026

AI-generated transcript — the recording is the record.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: role.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Great. For here one absent, we can get started.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: So the first item on the agenda for tonight is the resolution to publish the City Council newsletter. This was going to be done by Councilor Leming, so I will turn over to him to share his screen and for any edits for the other councilors.

[Councilor Matt Leming]: I'm just gonna share my screen really quickly, one moment. Okay. Everybody, so, yep, that is, this is where the magic happens. This is a draft I made of the City Council newsletter which covers every event that we've had since August. since the summer months of September through November 2026. It's a little bit longer than the typical newsletters I sent it out to folks on the committee yesterday just in case anybody wanted to look over it and get a little bit of extra feedback. I will say that we've had A little bit more drama with some of the resolutions, but also quite a bit more progress since the summer than I would say we usually do. So a couple of these items are a little bit longer than you'd find in typical newsletters it talks about.

For instance, the back and forth between the mayor and the city council on a lot of the legal things that have happened. It also contains sort of a... narrative just for folks to read through about, you know, the back and forth on the Boston Avenue corridor district, you know, the veto, et cetera, et cetera. Details of, yeah, you know, details on, I added an explanation of the math behind the fractional payments because, That is actually a pretty substantial win for getting money into the Affordable Housing Trust, but the math behind that is a little bit oddball. So there's a note here that goes into that.

Yep, linkage fee ordinance, just a description of the different, description of some of the different resolutions, but the appropriations, the funding requests from the mayor into their own little bullet point or, you know. section here as well, as well as some of the committee work, so some description of the Public Works and Facilities Committee meeting that we had and some of the follow-ups on that as well as activities. of the Public Health and Community Safety Committee as well, as well as some of the two Ward 1 and Ward 5 neighborhood meetings that occurred as well.

That covers it, so it's a little bit more texty than usual, but it also covers a pretty long period of time and, you know, goes into a little bit more, like, dissects a couple of the events a little bit more than, just because I think, you know, some narratives were needed with some of the stuff that was happening. I'd be pleased to hear any edits that folks may have to anything here.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Thank you, Councilor Luebing. The board meetings that you have here, are those linked back to MCM? Is that what they're, just for people who want to watch the video of it, or is it?

[Councilor Matt Leming]: Yep, it should link back to MCM. Okay I can make it actually link back to the board meetings themselves so that I could I could put that in as a as a correction to have it to put those into the you know make sure that the actual links there work.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great. Thank you. Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Super thorough. It's really amazing. A very tiny improvement, which is I think some of these titles that show up on the last line of the page before are a little harder to follow. So on the very first page, general business, that can just go on the page where all the general business is. Otherwise, like it just was, I think for people who aren't quite as aware of how we have organized these in the past, it just might be a little bit harder to follow. So that one, and then on the second to last page, the resident, page four, resident services, public engagement has the same issue. It's just hanging out on page four, but then all of the resident service public engagement stuff is in fact on page five. So if we can just push those down a page, I think that would help with readability.

[Councilor Matt Leming]: Yes, I'll get the hangers here. My idea was that if anybody had any text edits to that, then that would sort of be the last thing, because sometimes if somebody wanted to add something, that would naturally fix it. But if there's no edits to this, then I would just adjust the spacing here, which is a little bit tricky to do in LaTeX.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Amazing, thank you.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, and I mean, I read through it. I think it is very comprehensive. I appreciate that it's going back from the last newsletter up until it looks like, if I'm correct, Councilor Leming, to the meeting we've had yesterday. I think that was the last piece of it for the, I know it says September through November, but I think that was November 2nd was the last piece that we had at the front. Is that right? Yes. I think this looks great. I appreciate you putting this together and getting this sent out. And I still have nightmares as you're doing that coding on the left-hand side there, but it looks great. And is there any other edits or any other pieces to this or motions at this point in time?

Is there a motion to keep the paper in committee and we can move forward to the next item? I was going to.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Oh, great. Councilor Callahan? Yes. Motion to approve this version for this month and keep the paper in committee. Second. Great.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Clerk, do you mind calling the roll?

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Callahan?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Leming?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Scarpelli?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes. Four in the affirmative, one absent. Motion to move forward with this newsletter and keep this paper in committee. All right, moving on to the next piece, which is the resolution to schedule the neighborhood ward meetings. I'm just going to share my screen here. And let me go back up here for a second. So thank you, Councilor Callahan. I think you're next for the November newsletter. So I think as Matt said, he left off on the November 2nd date for the last meeting. And our next meeting is December 16th. So that would be when we want to try to review it. So thank you very much.

But I did want to turn it over to either Councilor Callahan or Councilor Tseng just to kind of give a recap of the Ward 5 meeting, anything to improve, follow up next steps, and then we can move on to the Ward 2 meeting. So Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Thank you. Yeah, it was a really amazing meeting. We had an RSVP link, and many people filled that out with their questions and concerns. And then we also, of course, had the in-person meeting at the Missittook Elementary School, and we had Zoom available there as well. So between all of those, we had at least 50 people, and I would say 25 or 30 in person. So it was a fantastic discussion. People were concerned about the topics that we ended up discussing, and people were concerned about included things such as trees and how to ensure we have more trees. Traffic safety was a big one. We talked a lot about traffic safety, pedestrian and bike safety in the ward. People also talked a little bit about the safety of our residents from ice and how to deal with that in our community.

Let's see, you know, these things only last an hour. So it ends up being actually difficult to talk about a lot of different things. So one thing I love about the way that, you know, we have done these so far is that we will make sure that everyone gets to speak by having that be the very opening is everyone gets 30 seconds to say what they are, you know, one or two things that they are concerned about. And that makes sure that, you know, every single person who attends gets a chance at least to bring up something that matters to them. So, you know, between all of those different avenues, we got a ton of feedback and a ton of ideas. People were also really interested in continuing to talk about traffic and safety and trees and all of these other issues that came up after that meeting as well. So it was very successful. And I don't know if people have any questions about it, but I'm happy to answer those as well.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: That's great to hear. I mean, it sounds like we're hearing feedback, at least when we did the ward, one meeting as well around traffic safety, calming, traffic calming ways to improve bike safety. Anything that you would suggest either from preparation during the meeting, et cetera, anything that we should think about trying to improve upon moving forward, or does it seem to be in a pretty good rhythm at this point in your, from this last meeting that you had?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: You know, I think it went off very well. You know, the guys who were helping us with the Zoom and doing audio visual and everything, Kevin and everyone, were fantastic. Really very professional, set up early. Everything was ready by the time we started. The format I think is very good, having everyone speak at the beginning and then after that, talking about the most often mentioned things those topics and letting there be a little bit more of a discussion with different ideas.

You know, I think the format worked really well. I think having the RSVP, the ability for people to RSVP if they can't make it so that they can also ensure that their concerns are heard. That also I think is really great, a great opportunity for people. And then we did send out an email after the fact. People actually signed up on sheets to be communicated with afterwards about different topics. So we sent a follow-up email as well.

with some information because for example there was like a traffic meetup that was already had already been scheduled for Ward 5 that was just a resident created event and so we let people know about that if they wanted to attend and an opportunity for people to be involved with tree planting that's happening I believe it's actually in Ward 4 but it's very close so we had some immediate follow-ups to let people continue their engagement. So I can't think of anything to improve. I think the format is working really well. And, you know, I think we're off to a really great start. We've done two of the eight awards so far.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great. Thank you, Councilor. We had sent a follow-up email as well to everyone that had signed up to any one of the different sheets that they were interested in about different meetings. So perhaps we can continuously just send out updates to people unless they respond to get removed from that list. But I think it's the best way to at least let people know when things are happening, especially given their interest, whether it's a noise ordinance or bike safety, et cetera. I think that's great about, you know, trees as well, even if it wasn't a different ward. So I think it's a nice way to at least provide an extra outreach to people who have raised their hand saying that they're interested. But if you get any other feedback about it, about other ways to try to connect people post-meeting, certainly open to hearing how else we can keep people engaged. So that's great.

The only other thing I had followed up on, one of the members of the committee who was not able to attend this evening had done some research about potentially providing child care services at the meetings, if that's helpful for parents. What we just found was it's a little bit tricky in order to try to set something like that up. We had been in touch with different organizations that have held meetings or done babysitting services during meetings in the past. And there's obviously different quarry checks and different types of volunteers we need to sign up, as well as, you know, safety measures, et cetera. We, at this point, we're not sure that it's going to be as easy or able to do. But if that's something that we hear more feedback from, from different residents, we can certainly relook at it. But as of right now, it just seemed like it might be pretty tricky to try to organize per each of these different ward meetings at the time. But we did look into it to see if that was something that could work for people. I don't know. Oh, Councilor Scarpelli.

[Councilor George Scarpelli]: Um, thank you, Madam chair. I think that it's funny in the neighboring community. Um, there's the recreation program developer who's amazing. Whenever they do these types of meetings, it's funny that they would ask the support of the recreation department to bring a Councilor or two with board games and arts and crafts. So parents that did want to join us but needed a little child care off to the side. Maybe that might be an avenue. I'll make a call to Kevin, see if that's in the budget. It might be a little tight. Uh, but that's something we should look into as we move on as these meetings grow, because I think it's very important. So. And by the way, the program developers me was. That's yeah, I'm sorry I said, by the way, the program developer in the name of communities me. So, why don't me so I'll reach out to Kevin see if there's a possible way that we can do that.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Thank you.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Councilor Kallion. I just want to thank Councilor Scarpelli for that. That's such a great insight into a neighboring community and how they do it. Exactly the kind of, you know, information that we need. And I'm very excited that we might be able to help parents, attendees as well.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, yes, thank you. Councilor Scarpelli, I appreciate you looking into that too. That'd be very helpful. Up next, Councilor Scarpelli and I will be hosting the Ward 2 meeting on Wednesday, December 2nd at the Roberts Cafeteria. I have already, I put together this checklist also to just keep myself in line of what we need to do. So I have already checked in with the director of facilities. MCM has already gotten me the Zoom link so we can move forward with all that.

And then some of the other sign up pieces I've already started to do. I'm just kind of finishing up. I had some thoughts around the invitation to also put in a link for people if they want to check to see what ward they're in to make it a little bit quicker right there. So had some thoughts just to tweak it a little bit and hopefully we'll get that out ASAP so that people are able to start signing up when they're able to. So again, that's next month and we'll start advertising that shortly and hopefully get as many people as we can to join us at that meeting too.

Any other thoughts, comments on those two ward meetings? Just remaining to schedule, we're working out dates with all of the different Councilors, but for January, Councilor Scarpelli and I are up again for Ward 4, and then in February, we have Ward 7 with Councilors Leming and Tseng, and then Ward 6, Councilor Callahan, Councilor Lazzaro, Ward 3 in April, President Bears, excuse me, Vice President Lazzaro, and then in May for Ward 8, Councilor Leming and President Bears. So I sent out some emails to everybody to try to see what dates that might work, and we'll start trying to get this set up so that we have the schedule ready for 2027 and try to get that out so at least people have the save the date on their calendars.

Any thoughts, questions, suggestions, or motions? Councilor Callahan?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Motion to keep the paper in committee and approve, or I don't know if approving is necessary.

[Councilor George Scarpelli]: I'll second that.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, thank you. Clerk, do you mind calling the roll?

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Callahan?

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Leming. Councilor Scarpelli.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Tseng.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: I know I saw him. He might be having some tech issues.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Chair Mullane.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes. Looks like we have... Sorry, I couldn't unmute. Oh, he raised his hand. Oh, great. Looks like we have five in the affirmative, so we can move on to the next item, which is to talk about the noise ordinance. So again, the last meeting that we had, Councilor Tseng walked through a really extensive slide deck to demonstrate some of the different areas that we can improve upon in comparison to neighboring areas. around the noise ordinance. And I think one of the things that we wanted to do, A, because we were just looking at it to allow time for Councilors to be able to take a look through the deck that he had put together for any additional questions. But I think our next steps on that were to kind of brainstorm some survey questions that we'd like to be able to get out to try to get more feedback from residents. I certainly know from our Ward 1 meeting that we had a lot of people come forward and had questions around the noise ordinance. I've certainly received many emails from residents about it as well. So I want to see that we can get this out to as many people as possible. So I'm going to stop sharing. And if Councilors have some ideas, some thoughts around survey questions that we can start putting together, that would be great.

Councilor Tseng.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Hi, I prepared a few questions, but I don't have co-host status on the Zoom, so I can't share my screen.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, thanks Councilor Tseng. You should be all set now.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Okay, give me a sec. Um, these were just some questions I drafted. Can you see, are you seeing the right word doc? I have like a million open.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Okay.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Um, so these are just kind of based on, um, I think, like, the kind of open questions that we have in the, um, in the ordinance draft. So I'd like to ask, like, what types of noise have bothered people at home in the past, um, like, in the past year? Um, the, this list is taken from the list that we have in the draft ordinance, and then the other would be a fill in the blank category. Second question being when does noise bother you the most this will I think help us with the time frame issues and we can like I'm happy to adjust the times to or do more specific blocks. I think that would also make sense.

I'd be curious to know if folks have ever reported a noise problem to the city and what that response was and what that report consisted of. And I think it'd be helpful to know generally like what neighborhoods people are kind of facing these issues in. Is it across the city? Is it more specific to one neighborhood? And perhaps between these last three questions that I've talked about, we can be a bit more proactive with our inspectors as well and send, ask them to send enforcement to the area. And then I think it'd be helpful for the ordinance if we knew what type of home people have been, because we, that shows up in the ordinance and a kind of open-ended question as well about what folks would like us to know about noise in their neighborhood.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: This is great, thank you, Councilor Tseng. On your first question up at the top there, do you think this is like a rank order? Like one, like people would be able to rank which ones are the most, or are you just saying people would be able to click out anything and all of them? So we wouldn't know which one's most, I guess, pressing.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: I think any and all seems to make sense given that the ordinance could cover any and all. I do see the argument for doing a ranked order, but I think ultimately just being able to identify which types of noise we should be regulating I think would be the most important question here.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, thank you. Councilor Scarpelli.

[Councilor George Scarpelli]: Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Councilor Tseng for bringing this forward. I think that maybe we should even ask the code enforcement officers to help us with this and maybe get a report with asking these specific questions that within the last two years say nothing crazy but getting getting something that has already exists. Maybe there's a format between the police department and their complaints and responses and and then the code enforcement department so we can see we can get some a kickstart and some of these numbers on these questions because these are I will I will tell you we're dealing right now with at work with my we have a kickball program on a Sunday night And the noise ordinance on a Sunday begins at 8. So we allow music until 730. We tell our participants and then we're seeing the impact it makes on the neighbors. And it's funny, but you don't when you think of one of the questions that you bring forward is the understanding. where we were getting residents that were living in apartment buildings in the higher levels that were complaining more than people that were below the fence level. So it makes a difference. So we can help everybody understand where the issues are and how we can really attack it with these corrections. And the other things we're seeing, especially near the stadium, and we're having issues with the noise going over to a neighboring community and they're sending over their state delegates to do sound checks and noise complaints from there, so understanding that. So, just relevance of what I see every day, and I think that might help with these questions, maybe already have some data that's already been created. So, if we can maybe ask that, that might help, because I think this is a good start with these questions. It really starts giving us a true understanding where we need support and where people are looking for help. So, thank you.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: If I may, Chair Mullane, I think that's a great idea. And I think it'd be really helpful to see what data we already have on it.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes, I agree. I think that would be really helpful to give a little bit more context to it as well. So we can work on trying to get some of those answers, too. And I actually like the length of this, too, because I know that once you get to a certain number of questions, people might also kind of stop paying attention or stop finishing it through. So I do think that, you know, putting it to this number of questions is also really helpful.

Any other Councilors, any other thoughts, feedback? And I can certainly follow up from Councilor Scarpelli's suggestion too. Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Thanks. A tiny, tiny suggestion, which is under question three. Have you ever reported a problem? The first one probably should be, no, I have never needed to. Because it never reported could also mean I didn't know how. Anyway, I think that covers all of them. But overall, I love this. The list of questions is great. And Councilor Scarpelli's idea of actually getting records from the city is also fantastic. So I'm looking forward to having all that information.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Um, Councilor Callahan, you gave me the idea of maybe adding an option of like, no, I didn't know how to report the problem. Maybe that would be like a helpful option to have as well.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Sounds good.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Um, I think something to look at is like, these are very broad, like this kind of tracks the ordinance right now. Um, but we might want to break these down, like the times in question two down into more specific time blocks. I just don't want it to be too like visually, um, confusing for people who are doing the survey. If we have like too many options. Um, and I'm curious what people think.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: That's a good point. I mean, it is quite a few options.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: I think it's a, I think it's fine. I don't really see a need to have it broken into into more options than that.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: I mean, I think that we've seen people, or at least I should speak for myself, that residents who have sent in any kind of emails around it are very kind of specific about what timeline times it's happening. So I think, I mean, I think that this is kind of helpful to maybe get a better sense of when this is truly most noticeable to residents in whichever area that they're living in.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: I think another approach we could take is just to leave this a bit more open-ended, and to maybe do some of this in the question itself. For example, early mornings, daytime, evenings, before seven, something like that, and then to do, instead of options here, a short answer.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: I mean that might streamline it a little bit if there's more of a descriptor at the top and then less choices to pick. But I do think it's a good start to at least get an idea from residents.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Cool. Well if folks are okay with this, I'd like to motion to to approve these questions and to, or to approve these questions upon final edit and to distribute to the public.

[Councilor George Scarpelli]: I would second that.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Clerk, do you mind calling the roll? Oh, we do have one resident hand up. I think it's Andy, do you have, did you want to respond to any of these questions? We can unmute you and you have three minutes. Andy, you've got three minutes.

[Andrew Castagnetti]: Thank you. Councilor. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Um, in my opinion, there's one major noise problem, um, for half the city and, uh, it's been going on since they built route 93 in 1960. So it's been going on nonstop for 66 years, 24 hours a day. And that is on the east side of 93, which is 93 north. There is no sound barrier. So all these families have been suffering for, again, 66 years. And I'm sure it's caused a lot of problems. And I believe, I wish you good luck if you decide to pick up this mission, because you probably have to come up to Massachusetts to put up a sound barrier, as they did on the west side of 93, which protects Medford Square and residents around water street, et cetera, hundreds of homes are being protected, but we don't have one on the other side. So that's all I want to say. Good night.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Thank you. Appreciate it. Um, all right. So on the original motion, um, clerk, do you mind calling the rule?

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Callahan?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Tseng.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Chair Mullane.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes. Five in the affirmative, none in the negative. We can keep this in committee and move forward with some of the questions. Last but not least, the resolution to improve the city website. At our last meeting, Councilor Tseng brought up some information around the city website, just some areas to kind of look at and address. And was able to kind of walk us through some things that we think might be some ways to streamline it, make it a little bit easier. I think as we mentioned last time, in our, at least during the Ward 1 meeting, the website did come up a few times that people had some difficulty navigating it and knowing where to go for certain information. So it seemed also rather timely to start having a conversation about it.

So I think we were just kind of having Councilors take a look, have any other suggestions, and then also potentially doing a survey around this to get additional resident feedback. And with that, I'll turn it over to Councilor Tseng.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Thanks, Chairman Mullane. I've also drafted a few questions for this. Let me share that doc. It's the same length. It's eight questions. I think starting off with basics, like how often do you use the website? What do you use it for? And having this be a checkbox. And how do you usually access the site? On a phone? Computer? Equally? I think that will help inform website design. This list I'm happy to add anything else. Let me just go through it quickly.

So I've put permits and inspections or maybe like getting information about permits and inspections, paying bills or fees, city council meetings or records, finding a department or office, city news and announcements, housing or tenant resources, trash, recycling, public works, Reporting an issue, senior services, something else. And it might make sense to break some of these into two points instead of one as well. For section two, it's more about the user experience. Just trying to understand, for example, how easy it is to find what you're looking for on the website.

Have you ever visited the website and left without finding what you needed? And which parts of the website have been the most frustrating or confusing? So, for example, navigation menus, search results, using it on a phone, outdated information, broken links, no content in my language, permits, online payments, city council information, or just none of the above. Yeah, and then the last two being just like kind of open-ended, what's the kind of single most important thing? We could even just do like most important things and then pick a few, like top three or something like that.

but for example making it easier to find services information, work better on phones, let me pay bills and apply for permits online, offer content in more languages, keep content current and accurate, be more accessible, better counsel and meeting information, and then an open a more open-ended version like asking if people tried to find some information on the website and couldn't and anything else we should know about their experience.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Thank you, Councilor Tseng. This looks great. I think the only thing I might, some of the wording of the questions I might try to work around, just putting it a little, maybe framing it a little bit more, like on the, which of the frustrating or confusing, or perhaps we can just rephrase that to which one needs the most improvement or something like that, just to make it, a little bit more less than the negative and perhaps more in the opportunities for improvement type of framework. But I think these are great. And definitely I'd be curious to see what people say around how often and how they're getting to it, whether their phone or their laptop, because certainly navigation using your phone has been rather challenging too on it. Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Thanks. Would you mind scrolling up to the top Great. So, I love the idea of sending this out. I do think that from like a technology and user experience perspective, we should definitely try and get some of the statistics from the website, so we can find out things like Whether people like for every single person who visits the site, we can know exactly what percentage are using it from their phone and which percentage are using it from their computer will we can, you know, they should have.

statistics on which pages get the most visits, first, second, third, fourth, fifth. So for these kinds of questions, I think having the actual statistics from the website itself would be very helpful, just given how much we know that surveys, it's really hard to get people to fill out surveys. So if we get 100 surveys in a city of 60,000 people, it's good to get a full picture of the complete data set for the things that we can get. So I encourage us to reach out to the technology folks because I'm sure they will be able to answer those questions.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great. Thank you, Councilor Callahan. Councilor Scarpelli.

[Councilor George Scarpelli]: You know those we've done things in the past working with the high school in the vocational school students and when we talk about what we're seeing in web design and. Maybe we could look into asking our superintendent, maybe we can ask our principals or headmasters and see if there's relevant classes that we can have our students actually look at our website. It would probably be a huge, great learning tool for them and really give us a lot of different set of eyes. Maybe that might be a possibility to to get some perspective as well. I know that there are web design classes and web design programs that I thought of that as we had a web design program at work and we had some pretty interesting evaluations from the students. And I think that maybe that might be an avenue we can look into and I can I can actually call Superintendent Lucy, maybe she can, you know, lead us to a direction that we can maybe have a conversation. So just a thought, but thank you.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: No, I think that's great too, Councilor Scarpelli. I think it'd be helpful to see, get feedback and utilize. Obviously, so many of our Medford students would be excellent at taking a look and giving feedback. So I think it's definitely something to explore and see what we have available. Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Thanks. Councilor Scarpelli, I think this is my favorite idea I've heard in the last like two or three weeks. I wonder if we could have this because I know they have like website design and technology is like fits very solidly within one of the specialties at the vocational school. And I wonder if we could actually work with them to make this a special project and in fact have some of the high school students like engage with us in improving the website, not just like looking at it, but have them go over the kinds of statistics that I was talking about. Because that is something that in web design, you actually, and user experience, you do look at you know, where people are coming on the site, and whether they're doing mobile or computer, and then evaluating it for, you know, it's for the ability for people to accomplish their goals and things.

Like, as deeply as we can get a group of kids engaged, I think that would be a really exciting project for them. And also, I think, certainly for me, but I think for us as a city council to be directly working with some high schoolers who plan on being in this field and doing this kind of work, we give them some really great experience as well. So I'm very excited about this idea and I'm really grateful for your input on this.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Great, agree.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Thank you.

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Yeah, I just wanted to thank you all for that feedback. I think that those are great ideas for getting more feedback from people and adding to the kind of pantheon of ideas we have about improving our website and making it more accessible and useful for residents. I'd like to motion to distribute this pending final edits as well.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Second. Great. Clerk, do you mind calling the roll?

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Callahan?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Looming? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli?

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Tseng?

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Yes.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes, it's five in the affirmative, zero in the negative. The motion passes and we can continue working on this. Are there any comments from any constituents that are on the call? Anything else they'd like to bring up during this meeting? Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: I apologize. I know we already disposed of that paper, but I did want to just ask if someone is going to reach out to our IT department and ask if they can provide some statistics on the website.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes, I can. I have it on my list to reach out to IT in general, and I'll add this piece of it to try to get the data points from them too.

[Councilor Anna Callahan]: Amazing. Thank you so much. Let me know if you have any questions about which things we're looking for.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Oh, terrific. Yes. Thank you. I'm seeing no hands raised. Are there any other motions?

[Councilor Justin Tseng]: Motion to adjourn.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Second. Second. Clerk, do you mind calling the roll?

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Callahan.

[Councilor Liz Mullane]: Yes.

[City Clerk Laurel Siegel]: Councilor Leming. Councilor Scarpelli.